Susie Baker

Susie Baker King Taylor
(1848-1912)

She was the first African American to teach openly in a school for former slaves in Georgia

Susie Baker, the daughter of slaves, was born in Liberty County on August 6, 1848. When she was about seven years old, her owner allowed her to go to Savannah to live with her grandmother. Despite Georgia's harsh Slave Laws against the formal education of African Americans, she attended two secret schools taught by black women. To avoid detection, Susie and the other children entered the school (home) separately and were sure to wrap their books with paper. From them she gained the rudiments of literacy, then extended her education with the help of two white youths, both of whom knowingly violated law and custom

On April 1, 1862, at age 14, Baker was sent back to the country to live with her mother around the time federal forces attacked nearby Fort Pulaski. When the fort was captured by the Union Army, Baker fled with her uncle’s family and other African Americans to Union-occupied St. Simons Island. Since most African Americans did not have an extensive education, word of Baker’s knowledge and intelligence spread among the Army officers on the island.

Five days after her arrival, Baker was offered books and school supplies by Commodore Louis M. Goldsborough if she agreed to organize a school for the children on St. Simon’s Island. Baker accepted the offer and became the first black teacher to openly instruct freed African American students in a freely operating freedmen's school in Georgia. By day she taught forty children and at night she instructed adults. Baker met and married her first husband, Edward King, a black non-commissioned officer in the Union Army, while teaching at St. Simon Island.

For three years she moved with her husband's and brothers' regiment, serving as nurse and laundress, and teaching many of the black soldiers to read and write during their off-duty hours. In 1866 she and Edward returned to Savannah, where she established a school for the freed children. Edward King died in September 1866, a few months before the birth of their first child. In 1867 she returned to her native Liberty County to establish another school. In 1868 she again relocated to Savannah, where she continued teaching freedmen for another year and supported herself through small tuition charges, never receiving aid from the northern freedmen's aid organizations.

In the 1870s King traveled to Boston as a domestic servant of a wealthy white family. While there she met and married Russell Taylor. With nursing being a passion of hers, Baker soon joined and then became president of the Women’s Relief Corps, which gave assistance to soldiers and hospitals.

She remained in Boston for the rest of her life, returning to the South only occasionally. After a trip to Louisiana in the 1890s to care for a dying son, Baker wrote her memoirs which she privately published them as a book in 1902 as Reminiscences of My Life in Camp with the 33rd US Colored Troops. Susie Baker King Taylor died in 1912 at the age of sixty-four in Boston.